Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza

Apotheosis of Music: Selected Poems

By Witold Wirpsza

Translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda

World Poetry Books 2025

According to the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, “One of the great spurs to translation is a cultural inferiority complex or a national self-loathing.” It’s a curious idea, but it doesn’t matter if it’s true: at this point, it’s impossible to ignore the last decade and its deluge of translated literature—novels, poetry, plays—much of it entering the English language at the behest of American publishers. While a few of the larger firms continue to sponsor a raft of Nobel laureates, most new translations arrive on the wings of the indie presses. One such operation, World Poetry Books, is a standout in a crowded field. Their books are suavely designed, expertly translated, and—oodles of extra credit on this point—most of their publications form their authors’ English debuts.

Apotheosis of Music offers just that: the first and long-awaited English-language collection of poems by Witold Wirpsza, a major post-war Polish poet. Unlike Czesław Miłosz or Wisława Szymborska, though, Wirpsza is not a household name—not in the West, at least, not yet.

Born in 1918, Wirpsza studied music at the Warsaw Conservatory and briefly worked as a concert pianist. During the Invasion of Poland he was captured by the Nazis, who kept him in a POW camp for the remainder of the war. In 1966 he emigrated to Austria, and in 1968 he settled down in West Berlin, where he kept things up poetically until his death in 1985.

With few exceptions, most of the book’s poems were written in the 1970s and ‘80s. Thanks to an official publication ban in Poland—communists held the nation captive from 1945 to 1989—Wirpsza’s work was read, for the most part, clandestinely. A handful of the book’s poems attempt to grapple with the conundrum of politics in the twentieth century, converging on the no-man’s-land of exile, censorship, and generalized precarity. In “Hardship,” which opens the collection, Wirpsza writes:

Not my hardships, but the ones that missed me,

Yet they did not miss others, and I saw that.

I was not led to the gas chamber,

Yet I know it was hard for others to step in.

I might have been there, but it missed me,

I saw photos and it was not hard to look at them.

I was not carried to the east in cattle carts,

But I know others found it hard to survive there.

It missed me, but I read books about it,

And the books were not hard to find.

Forty years span the gap between the events the poem relates and the date on which it was written (“March 3, 1984”), and while other poems fall in line to memorialize wartime and near-death experience, most of them fix their attention elsewhere—on music, for starters. Apotheosis of Music itself is a titular tip of the hat to one of the collection’s funniest, most inventive poems, “Apotheosis of the Dance,” a sequence that reconfigures history so that Dante and Stalin switch places (the one an executioner, the other, now, a poet), and Beethoven fakes his own death to the accompaniment of Plato at the piano. In the end, they all dance the can-can.

It’s a wonderful thing getting acclimated to Wirpsza’s particular blend of irony, history, and narrative. In “Music,” a family sits at their instruments in the parlor of their home: “Mother—piano, father— / flute, first / Son—double bass, second son—clarinet, third son—cello.” They play and play, but how long can they sit there reading their scores?

The notes (stems with heads) at some point will nail themselves

Into their skulls and they will walk around with nails in their heads.

The notes stick out of their heads making them look like hedgehogs

With ball-ended spines (all over town, and at work) and the tips

Of the stems in their brains will tickle. “What is

Tickling you, son?” “E, G#, B, and an E-major

Chord, Mom.” “And what is tickling you, Dad?” “B is tickling me,

Son, the leading tone to C.”

Music, music, music: Schubert booming over a stereo in “The Doppler Effect,” Brahms transcribing Bach’s Chaconne in “The Smuggler,” even Mozart shows up to pronounce that “Death is great and exchangeable” in “A Monologue,” a “poem” derived, Wirpsza claims (with a Borgesian wink), from a “recovered manuscript.” Yes, music—with all its variety of expression and feeling—is everywhere in the poetry of Witold Wirpsza. And thanks to a spectacular translation by Frank L. Vigoda (the pen name of translating duo Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel), you don’t just see the music here; you hear it.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.